Shelter Briefing: Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill - Committee Stages

Last week Shelter released a new report, Still Living in Limbo, which illustrated that temporary accommodation is now housing over 100,000 households, including over 125,000 children. This is a number that is on the rise; it has doubled in the last decade. Local authority housing waiting lists now sit at over 1.2 million households.

Over the same period, the number of social rented homes in England has fallen by 100,000. This isn’t a coincidence. The housing emergency is a symptom of our broken housing system not delivering the social homes that we desperately need.

The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill represents an opportunity to change the rules around planning and land to re-prioritise delivering social rent housing.

Shelter and our supporters are asking the House of Lords and the Government to support the following amendments:

Amendments 322 and 323 tabled by Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Baroness Hayman of Ullock redefines ‘affordable’ housing to mean genuinely affordable social rent housing.

Amendment 359 tabled by Lord Best ensures that social rent housing is a requirement of new housing developments for private developers.

Amendment 414 tabled by Baroness Taylor of Stevenage increases the powers of councils to acquire land to build social rent homes and the needed infrastructure.